Fifteen People per Square Mile
Gateway Drug to Revelation
We are a confounding, wretched, mesmerizing species, and there are a lot of us. I have always walked the other way.
Fourteen years ago my wife and I moved to northern New Mexico from the beautiful Eastern Shore of Maryland (Kent County)—very rural, or so you’d think, with seventy-three residents per square mile. Taos County has just fifteen! We’d drive into D.C. on walled expressways and I’d swear that just wasn’t my life. Not even the Shore. For me it all came down to living where Nature dominates man and not the other way around. Take away the crowds, and a cosmos opens up. Out here the spirits are in your face.
There will never be power lines or roads or condos in this view. For that matter, I can’t even go there, because everything you see here is sacred Taos Pueblo land. To me, realms like these pulse with unimaginable power. I think that if we feel it, something lights up in our DNA and we instantly become more human. This is why we need the wilderness, to learn the secret of the terrible beauty embedded in our hearts. There’s “something” there, all right, impossibly alien and ancient, and it doesn’t need us…
